Martin Limon: G. I. Bones

Miss Kim, the statuesque Admin secretary, did her best to ignore the three of us. She pecked away at her hangul typewriter, theoretically translating documents from English to Korean. Actually, I believed most of her attention was on Ernie. They’d been close once but after reading some of my reports, which often included Ernie’s dealings with the fair sex, she’d begun to pull away from him.

He didn’t seem to mind. Ernie Bascom was just over six feet tall, slender, with short sandy blond hair and green eyes behind round-lensed glasses and for some reason he drove women mad. I’m not sure why. I could only guess that it was because he was unpredictable; no woman ever knew if he was going to take a flying leap off a fast moving train or kneel and present her with a bouquet of spring roses. Ernie kept women guessing and once he had them confused he took his gratification where he found it.

Miss Kim had realized this and the realization made her furious at both of us. I tried to mollify her by being kind, occasionally placing a small gift on her desk, like a box of chocolates or a bottle of hand lotion from the Yongsan Main PX. It didn’t help. She blamed me, Ernie’s investigative partner, for leading him astray. Unfair. That was like blaming a canvas salesman for forcing Picasso to paint.

The time was now 0815. I clapped my hands. “Time to get cracking,” I said to Ernie.

He stared at me dully. He didn’t ask, Cracking on what?-not in front of Riley.

I half expected Riley to say that we had to wait for the first sergeant to return from his morning meeting with the provost marshal. He didn’t. That gave us deniability if the First Shirt later asked us where we’d been. Mentally, I rehearsed my line: “Nobody told us that we were supposed to wait around the office, Top.”

I rose from the gray, army-issue chair. Ernie stood too.

“Where the hell you two guys going?” Riley asked. “The commissary doesn’t open until ten.”

The 8th Army Commissary was where we monitored black-market activities. G.I. s, or more often their wives, bought goods from the commissary-bananas, maraschino cherries, instant coffee, soluble coffee creamer, sliced oxtail-all items difficult and expensive to obtain in Korea. Then they carted them out to Itaewon and sold them to one of the local black-market operators. The profit margin on most items was 100 percent, sometimes more. Despite the fact that there was a limit on how much a family could purchase each month, an industrious yobo-the Korean wife of an American G.I.-could pull down thousands of dollars per year; all of it strictly against Army regulations and strictly against the ROK- U.S. Status of Forces Agreement.

Black-marketing drove the honchos of 8th Army nuts. They didn’t like seeing all those Korean women scurrying around their PX and their commissary and they didn’t like the insolent attitude a G.I. developed when, for the first time in his life, he amassed ten thousand dollars in his bank account. That’s where the law enforcement officers of 8th Army CID came in. It was our job to bust black-marketeers. And at 8th Army staff meetings, the honchos considered this job just as important, if not more so, than solving assaults, rapes, murders, and other sorts of mayhem.

“We’ll be at the commissary by ten,” I replied.

“Yeah,” Riley said. “But where will you be till then?”

“At the SIR warehouse.”

SIR. Serious Incident Report. Riley didn’t ask us what we’d be doing there but, whatever it might be, it sounded like official business so he was satisfied. If he was questioned later by the First Shirt, his butt would be covered.

CYA. That’s what army bureaucracy is all about. Or as the Koreans say, cover your kundingi.

The warehouse was musty and the wooden door leading into the main storage area creaked when it opened. Fred Linderhaus, the NCO-in-charge, pointed us in the right direction.

“First thing in the morning,” he said, “two CID agents want to look at some old files. Must be something big.”

“Nothing big,” I said.

“Then what?”

Ernie stopped and turned to block Linderhaus’s way. “Do you have a freaking need to know?” he asked.

Since I’d first started working with Ernie Bascom, he’d been confrontational. This is a good thing in a criminal investigation agent and more than once his belligerent attitude had helped us gather information we needed or, more importantly, escape unscathed from a tough situation. Ernie’s temper also had its downside, like unnecessarily earning us enemies when what we needed was friends. His hometown was Detroit, the white suburbs not the black inner city, and I often thought that maybe it was something in the way he was brought up that caused him to be such a hothead. Or maybe it was the two tours he’d spent in Vietnam, under fire, buying pure China White from the snot-nosed boys on the other side of the concertina wire. Whatever the cause, lately Ernie had been more temperamental than usual. Almost anything would set him off. For the last few days, the chip on his shoulder teetered there like a claymore mine ready to explode. I hadn’t asked him about it. I hadn’t had the nerve.

Linderhaus’s eyes widened. “Hey,” he said, shrugging his big shoulders. “Just asking.”

“We’re doing research here,” Ernie continued, “because we’re writing a book. That’s all you need to know. You got it?”

“Got it,” Linderhaus replied. He stuck his hands in his pockets, turned, and shambled back down the dusty corridor.

After he’d left, I said, “You really know how to encourage voluntary cooperation, don’t you?”

Ernie snorted and grabbed his crotch. “He can voluntarily cooperate this.”

The warehouse was a large Quonset hut on a cement foundation divided by a series of plywood walls painted a shade of green the army calls “olive drab.” G.I. s call it “puke green.” Fluorescent lights, hanging from wooden rafters, buzzed overhead. Wooden shelving reaching ten feet high bearing cardboard boxes teetered above us. Each box was labeled. We were in a section marked SIRs, June 1962. Each box contained anywhere from thirty to a hundred SIRs for that month, statements concerning incidents that military police units throughout the Korean Peninsula considered important enough to report up the chain of command. If the 8th Army provost marshal agreed that the incident was serious, he included it in the blotter report that was presented daily to the commander, 8th United States Army. Once an incident was classified as a SIR, a file would be created, assigned a number, and an investigation launched, its progress tracked. The SIR remains open until the case is solved or otherwise declared closed.

Black-market cases usually don’t get SIR treatment, not unless the case is particularly egregious like the wholesale pilfering of a few tons of army-issue copper wire. Normally, SIRs are made about assaults, thefts, rapes, and murders involving US Forces personnel. Often, a Korean citizen is also involved-sometimes as the perpetrator, more often as the victim.

With 50,000 American G.I. s stationed in Korea since the war ended more than twenty years earlier, there had been plenty of serious incidents to report. Eighth Army’s purpose, according to military press releases, was to protect “Freedom’s Frontier.” That is, to deter the 700,000 North Korean Communist soldiers positioned just north of the Demilitarized Zone from invading their brethren in South Korea. Our real purpose, I believed, was to hold on to our empire. And many G.I. s who came to Korea and suddenly found themselves living in the lap of luxury-with houseboys to do their laundry and business girls to satisfy their needs after duty hours- took on the airs of potentates. And sometimes these petty potentates abused people they saw as their servants, which is why this SIR warehouse was stuffed full of box after box of paperwork reporting criminal activity.